Trail of blood in the hair salon: when hairstyles become weapons

In 1922, Erich Engel and Bertolt Brecht shot the surreal silent film Mysteries of a Hairdressing Salon in a Schwabing attic. In it, Karl Valentin in the role of Figaro would rather read the newspaper than grab the scissors, while his colleague (Blandine Ebinger) defaces an unpopular customer with a towering hairstyle. When she protests, she stuffs a cotton ball in her mouth. Eventually everything gets out of hand in the salon.

British director Thomas Hardiman wears a low-maintenance blonde short haircut. The ensemble cast of his feature film debut “Medusa Deluxe” also walks the fine line between talent and madness, but they would never refuse to work or deliberately abuse their customers. The hairdressers Divine, Cleve and Kendra love their job too much for that. They perform at their best on the heads of tolerable models, creating hair sculptures such as “Inverted Pear” or a Ghanaian multiple bun. You have to win a regional hairdressing competition.

From the very first shot of Robby Ryan’s elegant, flowing camera work, “Medusa Deluxe” casts a spell over fixing solutions, curling scissors and tremendous stylistic ambition. The shooting was based on Aristotle’s three units of location, time and plot in what appeared to be real time. And almost exclusively in the basement of a Brutalist 1970s multi-purpose hall, the Preston Guild Hall in the northwestern county of Lancashire. Hardiman, based in London, says he really appreciates working in the north of England: the sense of community there was a key driver of the film. You can feel that.

But the discovery of a grisly murder threatens to blow up the over-the-top competition: The participant Mosca was scalped by an unknown hand the night before, as his last model Etsy reported excitedly. From then on, the job-specific rumor mill simmers, and the scissors clatter all the more hectically. The hairdressing trade can be a dangerous business, says Cleve impassively, who allegedly lost an assistant to a hydrogen peroxide explosion.

The actress Clare Perkins gives her Cleve a brute shame mouth (“He’s been fucking butchered”), which stands in contrast to her well-groomed bleached bob. In the dialogue with the religious Divine (Kayla Meikle), a decidedly British whodunnit exchange of blows unfolds, which in the original version poses a small linguistic challenge for non-islanders.

Aristotelian unity of place, time and action

When the dominant Kendra appears – Harriet Webb grew up in Lancashire and speaks the appropriate dialect – the abstrusely attractive discourse on the connection between hair and violence is finally opened. A model she wants to give “a hairdo like a gun” asks her whether her hair has never been pulled. From the grab and drag (Grabbing and pulling) the hair in the schoolyard, it’s not far to the cut and pull (cutting and pulling) in scalping.

The rushed organizer René (Darrell D’Silva) has the thankless task of delivering the news of the death to the sobbing partner of the deceased. René wears a reptilian pattern which, together with the eponymous serpent head of Medusa, could bode ill. One particularly elaborate hairdo bursts into flames as another suspect emerges in gently enraptured security guard Gac.

The extremely diverse cast of actors had their hair fantastically colorful by none other than the London star Figaro Eugene Souleiman and appropriately dressed by Cynthia Lawrence-John. The vibrating sound of Lewis Roberts aka Koreless drives a wonderfully eccentric fluidum, which even a few lengths cannot harm. Thomas Hardiman’s devotion to his ensemble, trained on Robert Altman, can always be felt, for whom he wrote the sharp-tongued dialogues for him. As Cleve so aptly puts her credo: Your hair is the crown that you never take off.